Attention Read online

  Also by Casey Schwartz

  In the Mind Fields:

  Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis

  This is a work of nonfiction, but the names of certain individuals as well as identifying descriptive details concerning them have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Copyright © 2020 by Casey Schwartz

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Excerpt of “Praying” from Thirst by Mary Oliver, published in the United States by Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, in 2006. Copyright © 2006 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Schwartz, Casey, author.

  Title: Attention : a love story / Casey Schwartz.

  Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2020

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019027783 (print). LCCN 2019027784 (ebook). ISBN 9781524747107 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524747114 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Schwartz, Casey. Attention. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Distraction (Psychology). Information technology—Social aspects.

  Classification: LCC BF321.S337 2020 (print) | LCC BF321 (ebook) | DDC 153.7/33—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019027783

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019027784

  Ebook ISBN 9781524747114

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design by Stephanie Ross

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Casey Schwartz

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I: Seduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II: A Brief History of What Matters

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III: Inheritance

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For J.K. and, as always, M.B.

  Part I

  SEDUCTION

  1

  This story begins with the Adderall. I am referring to the pills that entered my life, as they did so many lives, when I was eighteen years old and stayed lodged there until I was thirty. These pills seemed to offer me pure, distilled attention any time I needed it, to compensate for whatever I imagined my deficiencies in that department to be.

  And, like any love story, I remember everything about the moment it began. In 2000, I was a freshman at Brown University. One night, still in our first term, I’d come to complain to a friend about the situation in which I found myself: an essay due the following afternoon on a book I had yet to read. All around us, her clothes were strewn messily on her dorm room floor. “Do you want an Adderall?” she asked. “I can’t stand them. They make me want to stay up all night doing cartwheels in the hall.” Could there be a more enticing description? From a ball of tinfoil, she pulled out a single pill, the deep bright blue of a cartoon sky. My hand shot out to receive it. I had come there merely to vent, but I left with my first Adderall—a medication prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a condition I knew nothing about, except for some vague awareness of classmates in high school who had needed extra time when taking their exams. At the time my friend unfurled her tinfoil ball, Adderall had been on the market roughly four years, but it was brand-new to me.

  An hour later, I was in the basement of the Rock, our nickname for the library, hunkered down in the Absolute Quiet Room, in a state of ecstasy. The world fell away; it was only me, locked in the passionate embrace of the book in front of me, and the thoughts I was having about it, which tumbled out of nowhere and built into what seemed a pile of riches. When dawn came to Providence, I was hunched over in the grubby lounge of my dormitory, typing my last fevered perceptions, barely aware that outside the window, the sky was turning pink. I was alone in my secret new world, and that aloneness was part of the great intoxication. I needed for nothing and no one.

  I didn’t know it then, but it was actually in Providence, nearly seventy years before, that Benzedrine, an amphetamine-based precursor to Adderall, had been given one of its first test runs. In 1937, at the Emma Pendleton Bradley Home for disturbed and difficult children, Dr. Charles Bradley performed the first of two experiments to test the effects of Benzedrine on children. The pills were created as decongestants but were also known to boost moods in adults. Dr. Bradley was surprised by the results: the kids calmed down, became less rowdy and raucous, and seemed to gobble up their school lessons with relish. They became, in other words, rapturously, singularly, focused.

  Like those difficult children before me, I would experience this same sensation again and again over the next four years, whenever I could get my hands on Adderall, which was frequently but not, I felt, frequently enough. There were ways of getting more, each of them shrouded in a thick ethical dinginess. For instance: The campus black market, where the ADHD kids sold off their prescriptions at exorbitant markups. The heiress whose pills I swiped while attending her numerous parties. Later, the barter system, wherein I helped with other people’s essays in exchange for their meds.

  Quickly, my Adderall hours became the most precious hours of my life, far too precious for the Absolute Quiet Room. I now needed to locate the most remote desk in the darkest, most neglected corner of the upper-level stacks, tucked farthest away from the humming campus life outside. That life no longer interested me. Instead, what mattered, what compelled, were the hours I spent in isolation, poring over, for instance, Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on “the sublime.” I read and reread the lines. The text was difficult, but my attention was now unflagging, bionic. The single greatest impediment to comprehension had been removed. The Kantian enigma clicked into place.

  It was fitting: this was sublime, these afternoons I spent in untrammeled focus, absorbing the complicated ideas in the books in front of me, mastering them, penetrating every inch of their surface with my razor-like comprehension, making them a part of myself. Or rather, of what I now thought of as my self, which is to say, the steely, undistractible person whom I vastly preferred to the lazier, glitchier person I secretly knew my actual self to be, the one who was subject to fits of lassitude and a tendency to eat too many Swedish Fish.

  I don’t think that in the years before I took that first blue pill, I had consciously doubted my own ability to focus. But once I tried Adderall, I couldn’t forget what it promised me: a quality of attention that I now idolized and craved. It was attention weaponized, slashing through procrastination and self-doubt, returning me to a place that felt almost like childhood, with its unclouded pleasures of rapt hours, lost in books and imagination. Childhood, but with a jittery amphetamine edge.

  Another thing: Adderall wiped away the question of willpower. I could study all night, then run ten miles, then breeze that week’s New Yorker, all without pausing to consider whether I might prefer to lie around, or go to the movies. It was fantastic.
I lost weight. That was nice too. Deeper into the Adderall years, I started to snap at friends, abruptly accessing huge depths of fury I wouldn’t have thought I possessed. When a roommate went home one weekend and forgot to turn off her alarm clock so that it beeped behind her locked door for forty-eight hours, I entirely lost control, calling her in New York to berate her. My anger, unhinged as it was, felt out of proportion to the crime. God knows how long it had been since I had slept more than five hours. Why bother?

  As much as I loved Adderall, which I did, from the earliest moments I also knew that, ultimately, nothing good could come of our entanglement. By senior year of college, my schoolwork had grown more, not less, unmanageable. I’d been accepted to a program called the Capstone, which I’d aspired to since I’d first arrived on campus. Instead of writing the usual thesis required for an honors degree, I would write a novella-length fiction manuscript, working with a faculty advisor in weekly editorial sessions. I was assigned to a new member of the creative writing faculty, one who had arrived on campus in a cloud of intrigue, having parted ways with the Mormon Church due to the heretical content of his novels. Or so I’d heard. He and I never really advanced beyond an awkward politeness. Our arrangement, such as it was, usually involved my telling him I was too far behind to profit from our slotted editorial meetings. And so, week after week, we would cancel.

  As the first semester neared an end, I was behind on the manuscript, and behind on all my other schoolwork as well. My droll, aristocratic Russian history professor granted me an extension on the final term paper. One Friday evening, well into December, when the idyllic New England campus had already begun to empty out for the winter holiday, I was alone at the Sciences Library—the one that stayed open the latest—squinting down at my notes on the Russian intelligentsia. Outside, it was blizzarding. Inside, the fluorescent lights beat down on the empty basement-level room. I felt dizzy and strange. It had been a particularly chemical week; several days had passed since I’d slept more than a handful of hours, taking more and more pills to compensate. When I looked up from the page, the bright room seemed to dilate around me, as if I weren’t really there, but rather stuck in some strange mirage. I seized with panic—what was happening? I tried to breathe, to snap myself back into reality. Shakily, I stood and made my way toward the phone. I dialed my friend Dave in his dorm room. “I’m having some kind of problem at the SciLi,” I told him. My own voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.

  Soon, I was in an ambulance, being taken through the snowstorm to the nearest hospital. The volunteer EMT was a Brown student whom I’d met once or twice. He held my hand the whole way. “Am I going to die?” I kept asking him. Dave and I sat for hours in the emergency room, until I was ushered behind a curtain and a skeptical-looking doctor came in to see me. I wasn’t used to being looked at the way he was looking at me, which is to say, like I was insane, an unstable force he needed to contain. By then I was feeling better, no longer so sure I was dying, and as I lay down on the examination table, I joked to him: “I will recline, like the Romans!” His expression remained unamused. His diagnosis: “Anxiety, amphetamine induced.” I had had my first panic attack, an uncommon but by no means unknown reaction to taking too much Adderall. When I left the hospital, I left behind the canister of blue pills that I had painstakingly scrounged together. I still remember the sight of it sitting next to the bed.

  I’d had a drug overdose, which seemed like the kind of thing one told one’s parents about. That particular week, my mother, a magazine journalist, was in Europe, deep into the reporting of her latest piece. I didn’t want to call her to say that I had OD’ed on Adderall and gone to the hospital, because she might feel she had to come home and, after all, I was fine. So instead I called my father, whose own parenting style was much less traditional. My parents were long divorced and it was possible, with my father, especially, to keep secrets. On the phone, I told him what had happened. I told him that in the emergency room, it had shocked me to be looked at as if I were nuts. He interrupted me, his voice uncharacteristically stern. “Well, in point of fact, you were nuts. You were nuts to take that number of pills.” He also mentioned, while we were on the subject, that he had felt, for the last two years, more and more, that I had become “unavailable” and “removed.” I promised him I would stop the Adderall. And in that moment, I meant it. A few days later, I drew incompletes in all my classes and came home to New York, where I spent the long winter break at the Forty-Second Street public library, lethargically soldiering through the essays I hadn’t been able to cope with while taking amphetamines.

  I suppose this is the place to mention that in New York, I had grown up in a community of writers and journalists, a world that prized curiosity and concentration. One constant soundtrack of my childhood was my mother, playing tapes: the recordings of interviews she’d done, the building blocks of the long articles she would write. From her office, I could hear endless hours of faceless voices as she sat there—at her typewriter, and then at her computer—constructing meaning, narrative, a way to understand what was being revealed. The tapes would unspool, guided by my mother’s inexhaustible questions, her subjects’ obliging answers. Her native Texas accent has long since been buried beneath her decades in New York, but the Texas in her lives on: she is the ultimate question asker, as much in everyday conversation as in her life as a journalist. In fact, for her, and now, unavoidably, for me, asking questions has always been the very definition of good manners: to show curiosity about another human being. And mean it.

  My father too was a writer, when he wasn’t on the radio, playing the Great American Songbook, Sinatra and Ella and Billie Holiday, and all the rest of the voices from that musically charmed era. He would tell me about his weeks in the California desert, where he disappeared to get his four books written, the routine of waking up at dawn, making coffee, and then just sitting there.

  Sitting there: that was key, apparently. I would have to master that ability, then, because for as long as I remembered, I had known that I had wanted to write. Through my childhood, my father would press his favorite authors on me, his every tone and gesture conveying their sacred importance: Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Elizabeth Hardwick, Renata Adler. These writers and their books were what we often talked about in our time together, which was limited because of the divorce. My father would tell me in his supercharged way: “Writing is one of the hardest jobs. I believe it’s what you’re going to do.” We were on a swing set in Carl Schurz Park, overlooking the East River, the first time I remember him saying that to me. I was five or six years old.

  * * *

  —

  Back on campus after the winter holiday, I was soon also back on the old chemical regimen. I was locked again into the familiar pattern, the blissful intensity and isolation, followed by days of slow-motion comedown, when I would laze around for hours, gobbling ice cream straight from the carton, desperate for the sugar rush, barely able to muster the energy to take a shower.

  My main concern now was my Capstone manuscript. I was by then so in thrall to Adderall that I was convinced I couldn’t sustain the creative impulse without it, that my attention would wander to trivial pursuits if I didn’t supercharge it with prescription speed. That was what so many writers had done before me, wasn’t it? Kerouac and the rest of the Beats, Graham Greene, Susan Sontag, W. H. Auden. I was simply following in the grand tradition of so many transatlantic geniuses. This was what I told myself.

  My writing process consisted of jagged, sleepless nights, humorless stretches of time in which I would lock myself away from my noisy roommates to conjure the amphetamine intensity that I mistook for real work. By the spring, I was so far behind on the manuscript that, in desperation, I spent the spring vacation—my last one in college—not with my friends or family, but alone in a cheap hotel room in Miami. I stayed up for days on too much Adderall, typing frantically in the red glow that came in from the garish ligh
ts of South Beach. When I felt stuck, I would walk up and down the beach in a furious state, castigating myself, at a remove from every human being around me. An irony: the manuscript I was writing was about a young man struggling with addiction, but I never thought to connect it to my own, or even to acknowledge that I had one. In the end, I finished it, but I felt a sense of deep shame attached to the manuscript, as if the pages themselves were contaminated. I turned it over to my ex-Mormon authority figure. Though his comments were generous, I did not look at it again for more than a decade.

  * * *

  —

  It took me exactly one year from the time of college graduation to come to the decision that would, to a great extent, shape the next phase of my life. It hit me like a revelation: it might be possible to declare my independence from the various ADHD kids who sold me their prescription pills and get a prescription all my own. The idea came as I walked among the palm trees on the campus of UCLA. By then, I was living in Los Angeles, working as a private tutor for high school kids (many of whom were themselves on Adderall) and taking summer school classes in psychology and neuroscience, in order to be able to apply for graduate school. I was going to train in psychology, a route that seemed infinitely more realistic than trying to make a career as a writer, I had decided. Like many twentysomethings, my decisions were informed by panic and haste, but, as well, by whatever short-lived supply of the pills I happened to be in possession of.

  I was now surrounded—or had surrounded myself—by others caught in the Adderall web. Two of my closest friends that year were both brimming with ambition and both the children of unusually accomplished parents. Together, we traversed the city in a state of perpetual, hyped-up intensity, exchanging confidences that later we would not recall. Adderall was the currency of our friendship; when one of us ran short of pills, another would cover the deficit. Driving through Los Angeles in a sun-drenched trance, weaving in and out of traffic, it was all too easy to lose track of exactly how many pills one had swallowed that day.